How to Do a Biblical Word Study Without Misusing Greek and Hebrew
The Sermon Illustration That Fell Apart
You have heard it. Maybe you have preached it. Paul says the gospel is "the power of God unto salvation" (Romans 1:16), and the Greek word for power is dunamis. And what English word comes from dunamis? Dynamite. So the gospel, we are told, is God's dynamite — explosive, world-shattering, blowing apart the strongholds of sin.
It preaches well. There is only one problem. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1867. Paul wrote Romans roughly eighteen centuries earlier, so dynamite could not have been in his mind. The illustration reads an English word back into the Greek.
The person who shared it was trying to go deeper. They opened a concordance, found the number, and looked up the word, which is what they had been told careful students do. The tool meant to protect them from misreading the text led them into a misreading.
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The Missing Sequence
Should ordinary Christians leave the original languages alone, then? I don't think so. Interlinears, Strong's numbers, and online lexicons have put Greek and Hebrew within reach of anyone with a phone, and that access is worth keeping.
Most of what you'll find online on this subject hands you one of two things: instructions for those tools, or a list of fallacies with technical names like the root fallacy, illegitimate totality transfer, and semantic anachronism. Both help. What few of them give you is a sequence to follow when you sit down with a word on Tuesday night. The rest of this post supplies one.
The Anchor: What 2 Timothy 2:15 Asks of a Workman
Paul told Timothy to be "a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth" (2 Timothy 2:15, NIV). The phrase correctly handles translates a single Greek verb, orthotomeō — roughly "cutting straight." Paul's picture is of a workman, someone whose way of working can be inspected and checked.
The Bereans in Acts 17:11 brought the same thing to the text: they received the message eagerly and "examined the Scriptures every day." Method is what keeps a word study honest once the lexicon is open.
Shortcut or Discipline: Five Moves That Change a Word Study
Most word-study errors come from a shortcut taken at one particular point in the process. Below are five moves, each paired with the shortcut it corrects. Take them in order.
1. Choose the word the passage leans on
The shortcut: picking whichever word sounds most sermon-worthy. The discipline: Read the passage three times in English, then look for the word the argument depends on. It is often repeated, sits in the main clause, or is a term the author defines or contrasts. Ask: if this word were removed, would the argument collapse? If the answer is no, keep looking.
2. Trace how the author uses it
The shortcut: breaking the word into parts or tracing its etymology and treating the origin as the meaning. This is the root fallacy; the English word "butterfly" says nothing about butter. The discipline: Use a concordance to see how this author uses this word. Begin in the same book, widen to the author's other writings, and look across the Testament last. A word means what the people using it meant when they wrote.
3. Survey the range, then let context choose one meaning
The shortcut: reading the whole lexicon entry and pouring every possible meaning into your verse, known as illegitimate totality transfer. The discipline: List the word's range of meaning, then ask which one sense the immediate context selects. The Greek word sarx can mean the physical body (Galatians 2:20) or humanity's rebellious nature (Galatians 5:17). In any given verse, the surrounding sentences decide which sense is in play.
4. Test your conclusion against the translations
The shortcut: announcing that "the Greek really says" something no English translation says. The discipline: Lay four or five translations side by side (for example ESV, NIV, CSB, NASB, NLT). Each was produced by a committee of trained linguists, and a Strong's entry can't match that. If your conclusion contradicts every one of them, go back and recheck your work.
5. Say it in plain English, or you haven't finished
The shortcut: stopping once you have the Greek word and its dictionary definition written in your notes. The discipline: Write one English sentence that explains what the author is saying and why this word matters to the passage. If you can't restate your finding without the Greek, the study isn't finished yet.
Walking John 21:15–17 Through the Five Moves
Let's test the method on one of the best-known word studies in evangelical preaching. After the resurrection, beside the Sea of Galilee, Jesus asks Peter three times, "Do you love me?" The first two times, Jesus uses agapaō. Peter answers with phileō. The third time, Jesus uses phileō. Many sermons explain that Jesus asked for sacrificial agapē love and Peter could only offer brotherly philia, so Jesus came down to Peter's level. Does the method bear that out?
Move one — the word the passage leans on. "Love" appears in every exchange, so it is the right word to study.
Move two — how John uses it. A concordance search in John's Gospel turns up this pattern. The Father loves the Son with agapaō in John 3:35 and with phileō in John 5:20. Jesus loves Lazarus with phileō in 11:3 and agapaō in 11:5. The "disciple whom Jesus loved" is described with agapaō in 13:23 and with phileō in 20:2. And in John 3:19, people agapaō the darkness. In John's usage, the two verbs overlap heavily.
Move three — let context choose. John 21:15–17 also varies feed and tend, lambs and sheep, and two verbs for know, and nobody builds a sermon on three grades of sheep. The variation in "love" fits the same stylistic habit. The context emphasizes the number three, and John names the reason Peter was hurt: "because Jesus asked him the third time" (21:17).
The concordance also turns up something the familiar sermon misses. The word for the "charcoal fire" in 21:9, anthrakia, appears only one other time in the New Testament: John 18:18, the fire where Peter warmed himself before denying Jesus. Peter denied Jesus three times beside a charcoal fire, and Jesus questions him three times beside another. The weight of the passage rests there.
Move four — test with translations. Most major English translations render both verbs as "love." The translators saw the two Greek words and judged the difference unimportant here.
Move five — say it plainly. Jesus restores Peter by walking him back through his failure, one question for each denial, beside the same kind of fire, and then gives him a shepherd's work to do. That reading preaches every bit as well as the old one, and it has the text behind it.
What Thirty Years of Pulpits Taught Me About Greek
In more than thirty years of ministry — in American pulpits and in classrooms across Africa where students are reading Scripture in their third or fourth language — I have noticed that the believers most eager to use Greek and Hebrew are often the sincerest about the Bible. They want to get beneath the surface, and that hunger deserves to be fed.
I have also watched what happens when a congregation hears "the Greek really means" too often. People begin to assume their Bible can't be trusted without an expert beside it. A sound word study should send you back to your English Bible with more confidence in it.
Your First Honest Word Study
Here is your assignment for this week. Take a passage you are already reading, find the word it leans on, and walk that word through the five moves.
If you want a starting place, try hesed — "steadfast love" or "lovingkindness" — in Psalm 136, and trace how the same word runs through Exodus 34:6–7. Watch what happens when you let the Old Testament define its own vocabulary.
Then do what the Bereans did and come back to the text again tomorrow. A word study is worth the effort when it helps you hear the one Word more clearly.
Keep Building Your Study Method
Word studies work best inside a larger method of observation, interpretation, and application. If you are new to that process, start here:
The Inductive Bible Study Method: A Complete Guide
Start Here: Your Path to Studying, Applying, and Teaching the Bible
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